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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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Israel’s Top Diplomat Calls on Jews to Make Aliyah Amid Global Surge in Antisemitic Violence
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar attends a press conference with the Danish Foreign Minister (not pictured) in Jerusalem, Sept. 7, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard/via REUTERS
Amid a global surge in antisemitic violence, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has urged Jews living abroad to make aliyah to Israel, warning that diaspora communities are increasingly vulnerable to hatred and hostility as foreign governments fail to protect them.
“Over the past year, we have concentrated efforts in the fight against the rising antisemitism around the world,” Saar said Sunday during a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in Rishon LeZion, a city in central Israel.
“We demanded that foreign governments take real steps against the new antisemitism. Few did so. Most allowed an unrestrained surge of overt antisemitism in the public sphere,” the top Israeli diplomat continued.
Saar’s latest remarks come in the wake of a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last Sunday, which left 15 dead and at least 40 injured.
Earlier this year, a string of deadly terrorist attacks also targeted Jewish communities, including the Yom Kippur assault in Manchester that killed two Jewish men, the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado – which killed one and injured 13 – and the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
“Jews have the right to live in safety everywhere. Today, Jews are being hunted across the world. Today I call on Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Australia, Jews in Canada, Jews in Belgium: come to the Land of Israel! Come home!” Saar said during his speech.
“We are waiting for you here with open arms. With love. In the true home of the Jewish people. Why raise your children in this atmosphere?” the Israeli diplomat continued. “Come with your families to the land of our forefathers, to the State of Israel, where the Jews taught the entire world what Jewish self-defense means. The time has come.”
Jewish communities around the world, especially in Europe, have faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes, ranging from the vandalism of murals and businesses to violent physical assaults, that their communities continue to face.
In the United Kingdom, more than half of British Jews — 51 percent — believe they have no long-term future in the country or elsewhere in Europe, according to a survey conducted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released Monday.
Amid this climate of rising hostility, almost half of British Jews (45 percent) report feeling unwelcome in the UK, while a majority (61 percent) have considered leaving the country in the past two years, citing the recent surge in antisemitism as the main reason.
The newly released report also found that 59 percent of British Jews try to avoid displaying visible signs of their Jewish identity out of fear of antisemitic attacks, while 96 percent believe that Jews in Britain are less safe now than they were before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Fewer than one in ten British Jews believe authorities are doing enough to tackle antisemitism, with only 14 percent feeling that the police are adequately protecting them.
In France, the local Jewish community has also faced a growing climate of hostility and antisemitic violence, which has even extended into politics, sparking national debates and drawing condemnation from leaders and civil society groups.
In one of the latest controversies, Bernard Bazinet, the mayor of Augignac in the southwestern Dordogne region, was expelled from the French Socialist Party earlier this month after posting antisemitic comments online about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
“France is too Jewish to boycott [Eurovision]!” Bazinet wrote in a post on Facebook.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez strongly condemned Bazinet’s comments, warning that he could face sanctions ranging from suspension to outright dismissal.
However, the rising wave of antisemitic attacks and hatred has spread beyond Western countries, reaching nations across the Eastern Mediterranean and other regions worldwide.
On Sunday, a group of Jews in Istanbul were attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters while on their way to light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle at the Neve Shalom synagogue.
According to widely circulated social media videos, the attackers approached the group while shouting, “These Zionists should leave this country,” waving Palestinian flags as they tried to get closer.
In a separate incident over the weekend, an Israeli man was attacked outside the hotel where he was staying in Limassol, Cyprus, after assailants reportedly heard him speaking Hebrew on the phone.
According to the victim’s father, his son was talking on the phone when a man approached him, asked for a cigarette, and then brutally assaulted him.
The victim was rushed to a local hospital and then flown to Israel on Sunday for emergency eye surgery after the attack, but doctors were unable to save his vision.
“My son, a young Israeli, was violently attacked at the entrance to the hotel where he was staying in Cyprus. Not on the street, not in a bar. At the entrance to the hotel — a place that is supposed to be safe and secure,” the victim’s father wrote in a post on Facebook. “He was brutally beaten, injured in the head and face, and evacuated for medical treatment.”
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Northwestern University’s Doha Campus a ‘Pipeline’ for Qatari Elites, New Report Finds
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani speaks on the first day of the 23rd edition of the annual Doha Forum, in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
The children of the Qatari aristocracy are vastly overrepresented at the Northwestern University campus in Qatar (NU-Q), a fact that, according to a new report, undermines the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by acting in practice as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
The Middle East Forum (MEF), a think tank whose mission is to protect Western values and promote US interests in the Middle East, published its findings on NU-Q in a damning new report. MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
“Northwestern’s Qatar (NU-Q) campus has become a de facto elite access pipeline, admitting members of Qatar’s most powerful royal and ruling families at rates that bear no resemblance to the country’s demographic reality,” says the report, titled “How the Qatari Royals and Elite Conquered Northwestern University’s Qatar Campus in Doha.”
“Rather than functioning as an open academic institution, NU-Q operates as a selective training ground for the same families who finance and control the campus, effectively blurring the line between a US university and a state-run patronage system,” the report continues. “What emerges is not merely an educational partnership, but a closed-loop system of influence production which a US university’s foreign campus helps cultivate the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class, with direct implications for US policy, national security, and foreign influence.”
The report goes on to say that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continues. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
MEF’s report has deep roots in debates over the Middle East and the ambiguities inherent in how countries conduct their international affairs.
Until the collapse of the British Empire in the years following the conclusion of World War II, Qatar functioned as a pillar and beneficiary of Great Britain’s regional order in the Middle East, having agreed to be one of many Persian Gulf protectorates which blocked Ottoman expansion and protected Great Britain’s sea route to its imperial holdings in India. The US opened diplomatic relations with the oil-rich kingdom in 1971 after it achieved independence from Great Britain, and the two states continue to enjoy what the US State Department describes as a “strategic partnership” for fostering economic growth, counterterrorism, cultural exchange, and defense and security cooperation.
The US designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally in 2022, and President Donald Trump earlier this year committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
However, Qatar has also been a patron of Hamas for years, hosting the Palestinian terrorist group’s political bureau in Doha since 2012.
During the same period, the Middle Eastern monarchy has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US. MEF released a separate report in May exposing the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts described as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. The findings showed that Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.
This effort has focused heavily on higher education.
A recent report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), for example, found that Qatar has funneled roughly $20 billion into American schools and universities over five decades as part of a coordinated, 100-year project to embed Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in the US.
The 200-page report, unveiled in Washington, DC to members of Congress, chronicled a 50-year effort by Brotherhood-linked groups to embed themselves in American academia, civil society, and government agencies, exposing what ISGAP called the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy, while maintaining an agenda fundamentally at odds with liberal democratic values.
In June, ISGAP released a separate report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” a 132-page document which described dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown University’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its Qatari benefactors — who have given it over $1 billion over the past decade — the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, located in the Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report said, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Trump signed an executive order last month directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The order did not mention Qatar, but experts have flagged Doha’s support for a wide range of Islamist groups.
“From the Taliban to Hamas to violent Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to Somalia’s Al-Shabab, Qatar allows the groups it hosts to access the global financial system and launder money,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin wrote in September. “Qatar has long been part of [a] war on the West, even as it tries to escape accountability for its actions. Moral clarity matters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Pennsylvania principal to be fired over antisemitic voicemail: ‘They control the banks’
A Pennsylvania elementary school principal is facing termination by his school district after he accidentally recorded himself making antisemitic remarks in a voicemail to a Jewish parent.
Philip Leddy, the principal of the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in Montgomery County, confirmed to the Wissahickon School District that he had made the antisemitic remarks heard on the voicemail message Friday morning after he believed he had disconnected the call, according to an email sent to the district’s parents.
In the recording, Leddy made a reference to “Jew camp,” and told another staff member at the school that the parent has “Jew money” and claimed that “they control the banks,” according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Later, when asked whether the parent was a lawyer, Leddy responded, “the odds are probably good.”
“What is most concerning is not only the language itself, but the mindset it reflects,” the federation wrote in a statement. “The comments rely on well-known antisemitic stereotypes that reduce a parent to caricature and signal hostility rather than respect. For a family entrusting their child to a school community, hearing this kind of language, particularly from a principal, is profoundly unsettling.”
Leddy was hired as the principal for the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in 2023 after previously serving as committee chair of the district’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, according to a since-deleted profile for him on the school’s website.
In an email to the Wissahickon School District, Superintendent Mwenyewe Dawan wrote that the district’s administrative team was recommending immediate termination of Leddy, pending an “informal private hearing on Monday morning.”
The school district did not immediately respond to a request for an update on the hearing from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Monday morning.
Dawan wrote that Leddy had been placed on administrative leave, and that another staff member heard on the call was also placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
“The fact that any employees entrusted with the care and well-being of students could make, or passively tolerate, such remarks raise concerns that extend beyond the conduct of a single individual,” wrote Dawan. “This incident underscores concerns for broader, systemic issues related to antisemitism that must be examined and addressed.”
The Jewish parent, who requested anonymity, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy had initially called him in response to an email about an incident involving his daughter.
“I couldn’t believe it, like I was seeing Jew this, Jew that, and I was thinking, ‘This can’t be the principal leaving a voicemail,’” the parent told Action News 6ABC.
Rabbi Kevin Lefkowitz, the leader of Tiferet Bet Israel, a Conservative congregation in Montgomery County, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy’s rhetoric had “boiled my blood.”
“He’s in charge of keeping our kids safe. For it to come out of his mouth so carelessly, so easily, it boiled my blood,” Lefkowitz said.
The incident comes one month after the House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation into the School District of Philadelphia for allegedly promoting a hostile environment for Jewish K-12 students.
In 2024, Pennsylvania saw 465 antisemitic incidents, marking a 18% rise from 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual antisemitism audit.
“No one promoting antisemitic rhetoric should be leading and teaching our children,” said Andrew Goretsky, the senior regional director of ADL Philadelphia, in a post on Facebook. “We are urging them to fully investigate the situation, take the appropriate systemic action, and meet with Jewish families to begin the process of rebuilding trust.”
In her email to the district community, Dawan added that the school had already partnered with the ADL to provide trainings on antisemitism and bias response to the district’s administration in November and December, and that the trainings would be provided to the rest of its teachers and staff as planned.
‘While this incident is clearly deeply damaging, upsetting, and concerning, it is important to remember that our staff as a whole are deeply caring, respectful, and sensitive,” wrote Dawan. “I do not believe the actions and words of this principal reflect the views of our staff. One person’s hateful actions should not negatively impact the way our community views the rest of our staff.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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